Tagging is an often overlooked but incredibly crucial tool to using AWS. When managing large groups or multiple projects, this will allow you to track your resources in multiple dimensions.
Tagging Basics
Tags are composed of keys and values. The key the overall category that you want to track- say “grant”, or “name”, or “user”. The value is the associated category value, such at “0037592”, “PopgenMachine”, or “Fred”. Tags are not added automatically by AWS, and are instead dependent on the user. Within this tutorial, all resources can be tagged (EC2, AMIs, Snapshots, EBS Volumes). You can use up to 50 tags on each resource, so go wild. AWS has a handy tag editor function that can help you search for resources and apply tags.
Tagging Examples
Tagging resources by hand
Tagging resources using the tag editor function
Further Reading
As with many things, AWS has a page for that. Here, you can read about tagging in more detail.